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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This debate was basically ended through that popular Reddit post where someone took all the popular ranking systems and averaged each top school's ranks to find the best overall schools: https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/xc0v5x/the_2023_supreme_t75_college_ranking_aggregating/

My breakdown would be:
1A) MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, Duke, Yale
1B) Penn, Caltech, Columbia, Northwestern

2A) Vanderbilt, Rice, Dartmouth, Brown, UChicago, Cornell, Williams, Amherst, Pomona
2B) UMich, Johns Hopkins, WashU, Notre Dame, Georgetown, UCLA, Berkeley, Swarthmore, Bowdoin, Claremont McKenna

3A) UVA, UNC, CMU, UF, Emory, USC, Georgia Tech, Wellesley, Barnard, Carleton, Middlebury
3B) UCSD, BC, UT Austin, W&M, UIUC, W&L, Vassar, Davidson, Hamilton, Haverford[/quote]

+1 The Reddit post is definitely the fairest way to do it if there's any way of doing this at all. Using 13 rankings and averaging them is a reasonably impartial measure to see what schools are widely considered the best. It's crazy that only four schools are in the top 10 in all 13 rankings, but it least it shows consistency: MIT, Stanford, Princeton, and Duke. Harvard of course got ambushed by Forbes college ranking this year so it unfortunately missed out.[/quote]

Most of the 13 rankings don't have wide circulation or almost any public acceptance, so it honestly doesn't matter. We could add in 5 of the reranked lists from this thread, which would make 18 rankings. Would that be even fairer than the fairest way of doing things?[/quote]

I kind of agree, I looked at the Reddit post and I would say probably 8 of the 13 rankings that were used are actually valuable based on their methodologies and circulation: US News, WSJ/THE, Forbes, Niche, Washington Monthly, Money, Wallet Hub, and Degree Choices. I think the other 5 probably don't need to be considered much and are a bit redundant. Still, even taking out those 5 rankings the overall numbers don't change much. MIT is still #1 by a good margin, the top 6 are still MIT/Stanford/Princeton/Harvard/Duke/Yale by a good margin, Penn/Caltech/Columbia/Northwestern are next up, and Rice/Dartmouth/UChicago/Brown/Cornell round out the top private schools. I think the main difference is some of the best public schools go up more, like UMich, UCLA, and Berkeley.[/quote]
Wouldn't it be amazing if there was just 1 publication that had by far the largest American rankings circulation  :wink: ? 
If there was such a list (or 2), would the methodology of other lists that are rarely used really even matter? 
Pushing that publisher to make meaningful updates to their methodology might be far more important...[/quote]

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